Opinion: It doesn’t matter if adult art is more popular than clean art.

by Patch O'Furr

Tinydeerguy’s tweetshows his character being unhappy that being tame is less popular than being sexy. It has thousands of likes and the comments agree. They look down on this situation, or admit it’s true by asking him to take it all off.

Tinydeerguy’s FA gallery demonstrates it with view numbers. The first page has many tame cartoons with a range of cute stories, but about one in eight are labeled “oh look porn”, “yay another porn,” etc. They don’t tease, they get right to the point – dicks! Art in the dirty 1/8 gets twice as many views.

Honestly, I think the ratio of 7/8 cuteness to one boner is perfect. If that’s what you want, it’s rewarding without being a one-trick pony. If you don’t, it’s mostly just cute. Pure porn would be monotonous, but the context gives it great variety and it all fits together for the character.

The dirty 1/8 seems to be judged less valuable with titles that are less thoughtful than others. But Tinydeerguy is enjoying the attention and pointing it out at the same time. (You could call that a wee bit hypocritical, but I think it shows social shame, not personal cynicism.) The many likers/judgers are doing that too.

Isn’t that kind of self-hateful?

Adult art has always been popular like that, and liable to get hate. The Burned Furs made an entire puritanical crusade against it. They claimed it was degenerate. They were wrong.

First of all, it’s nobody’s business to judge. Sex is healthy and drawing it is more creative than any other depiction. For furry art, it’s a feature not a bug:

“I adore furry porn,” says The Dog. “I much prefer it to images of real life humans. I think it’s worth mentioning that furry porn tends to have more humanity than a lot of ‘regular’ porn. Since it’s a drawing, the artist has to bring emotion and humanity into the image in order to make it relatable on some level.” Furry porn endeavors toward emotional narratives, and most mainstream pornographic films still don’t employ that strategy.

Look beyond the one example of Tinydeerguy. Popufur.com ranks the most popular furry artists on FurAffinity. (The site seems broken and I can’t tell when it was last updated, but you can still see a list that demonstrates the point.) The top 20 artists on the list all have porn in their galleries.

You HAVE to draw porn to get popular, right?

Wrong… that’s not looking high enough. Fandom isn’t the whole world.

Look at a list of prestigious convention guests of honor. You can find many who are honored for achieving in the mainstream. They may not be furries, it’s true, but they’re adjacent by accepting the invitation to mingle. They’re artists and fans too, with careers that many furry artists aspire to.

Those guests of honor don’t have to draw dirty to get professional. (Actually, some do it privately – It’s best to keep it separate from a portfolio, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not so stigmatized these days as it used to be. Companies understand that artists work for passion or take many different kinds of jobs, and furry is even a cool marketing thing now.) They succeeded with tame art – and so can you.

Being “forced” to draw dirty is more like making a choice between getting good enough as an artist to win recognition – or delivering a type of content in demand. It’s not even a dichotomy if you’re a professional with separate accounts. Of course, art is hard and competitive and involves doing stuff that isn’t personal passion, but that’s just part of the job if you choose it. Mainstream pros are no less prone to feeling pigeonholed by assembly-line work.

OK, success has different standards for different kinds. So why is dirty furry art so popular, again? Is the group filled with lust-driven pervos? I would say they’re just more liberated and confident about following what they like than the average person. And the mainstream doesn’t have a place for adult furry content. It’s not on the same playing field.

Tame stuff already has the mainstream to support it. Dirty stuff flourishes in a niche we created. The growth has been incredible, making opportunity for hobby artists to get chops and move ahead without mainstream patronage. Thank the freaks for making MORE opportunity for tame artists.

That’s why dirty art does so well in fandom. It’s not just about cheap thrills, it’s also about independent freedom. That’s the value of WTF.

The last thing I want to say is that it’s not a competition. If a dirty artist gets 1,000 likes and your tame art gets three… Someone likes you. Appreciate the RIGHT someones. Don’t chase popularity, let them find you. You don’t need the same likes as the other guy, because you don’t need to draw the same as them. Do it your way.

I love this fandom because nobody decided to make it happen – you did it your way.

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17 Responses to “Opinion: It doesn’t matter if adult art is more popular than clean art.”

As a working artist, I completely disagree. If good art got attention/likes/sales because it was good art, whether or not it had “adult content,” that would be one thing. What happens instead is bad art gets attention/likes/sales -if and because it is porn-.

Good art that is not porn -can- get attention, but it’s fighting your way upstream. The math is something like this:

GOOD ART: +1
REALLY GOOD ART: +2
BAD ART: -1
PORN: +3
NOT PORN: -1

GOAL: Get to 1 or higher.

You can see the effect at any furry art show. The adult section is crammed with substandard art having its sales inflated by the crutch of adult content, while the general section has amazing works that have no bids at all.

Tinydeerguy is exactly right. And as an artist who cares about their work but also has pressure to actually stay in the art business, it’s a terrible place to be.

Thanks! I have to say, I have made a living from art, and I would call that “furry tunnel vision”. In other words as the article implies, clean vs. dirty is apples and oranges. Even if they’re both furry they have different frames of reference. For adult art, a tiny niche fandom affords freedoms the mainstream doesn’t. For clean art to get better success, don’t just cater to furry fans, broaden what you’re doing and apply it elsewhere. Like for clean animation art, success is in the professional TV/movie world. For others, it may be in fine art wildlife painting. Makers of 3D anthro stuff may accomplish enough to get invited to the white house. See Nambroth and Lindz getting that kind of success: http://dogpatch.press/2014/09/25/furries-federal-duck-stamp/

Humans are sexualized beings, and when you try to censor, repress, stifle, limit, ban, or criminalize it, the result is that these inner needs to satisfy our need for sex come out in inappropriate and unhealthy ways. A good example is the scandal with Catholic priests, people who were told they could have absolutely no sex, but they HAD to have release, so they did so in secretive and terrible ways. Americans are neurotic about sex. Oddly, they will flock to a lousy movie like “50 Shades of Gray” because of the kink, while at the same time condemning it and refusing to admit they like it. Furries, by expressing their sexual creativity, are actually mentally and emotionally HEALTHIER that sexually repressed mundanes.

It’s not that clean art isn’t popular. It’s just there’s more of a demand for porn within the fandom due to the fandom being so niche and its relative youth. Most people in their teens and 20’s tend to have more active sex drives or at least be more interested in sexual themes.

That and like the old adage says, “Sex sells”. It’s not just a furry thing.

As far as how artists should look at it-If you don’t like drawing porn that’s fine. You don’t -need- to draw porn to be a successful artist. You -do- need a ‘hook’. Something about your art that makes it stand out and speak to people. That comes with time and effort and a willingness to take chances on yourself and on your art.

Maybe furries just hate clothing and the more nude the better? A completely nude character is tame in my opinion unless it’s clearly engaged in a sexual pose. I mean look around, animals are running all over this planet with their junk out and there’s nothing sexy about it.

Has anyone done a more thorough investigation of this phenomena, comparing not only favs on NSFW art as FA defines it but also comparing tasteful nudity to blatant pornography? I bet the numbers would be interesting and would show that it is not all about dicks.

I’ve always thought there’s an kind of learned helplessness in the assumption that you can’t get anywhere in furry fandom unless you draw porn. There’s a kind of fatalism in saying that. It’s like, no matter what actual success you have, you’ve already written it off just because there’s always going to be someone on popufur.com who has more watches than you, even though that would still be true if you drew porn anyway.

I think the most important thing you need in order to be successful at any artistic undertaking is that you need to love doing it more than you love being praised for doing it. The people who become successful writers aren’t people who watch successful writers doing interviews about their new book, or accepting a Hugo Award, and who think “I wish I could do that.” The people who become successful writers are people who write about things all the time, because that’s what they find engaging. So I think a more productive way of looking at the issue is that in order to attract an audience, you need a hook. You need some sort of unique concept or aesthetic to set your work apart from everyone else.

And if you want to be successful with subject matter that isn’t porn, you can’t use porn as your reference point for how things are done. You can’t think of yourself as doing the same thing porn artists are doing except that you don’t show characters doing it, because then you’re just copying someone else’s business, only without the hook that gets people interested in it. Besides, as amazing as it is that there are some artists that are actually able to make a living off furry commissions now, it’s not something that’s ever going to make anyone rich, and it’s not worth spending your time drawing subjects that you don’t find any enjoyment in. Especially because your gallery, and the commissions you’ve done for people before, will be what people looking for commissions use to conceptualize what you do and what they want from you, so if you’re taking commissions of subjects you can’t stand, they can very quickly become what you’re known for.

(This goes double for fetish commissions. I’ve said many times before that one piece of advice I wish more furry artists got was not to take fetish commissions unless they’d be okay with people continuing to ask for that fetish every time they open for commissions, because the people who are into that fetish are always, always, always going to want more of it. And I might want very much for a lot of up-and-coming artists to draw fetish-related art of my character, but I’m not going to try to push someone into drawing my fetish if they don’t want anything to do with it, because all that’s going to do is to poison the well; it’s just going to make people conclude that being a furry artist isn’t worth it because furries are a bunch of inconsiderate assclowns with no boundaries, and it’s just going to make the world worse for everyone.)

But how successful can anyone ever really expect to be in furry fandom without drawing porn? Well, I don’t think there’s anyone in the fandom who’s gotten commissions from more people based on a single concept than Mary Mouse with her “Certified” badges, and commissions don’t really get any more safe for work than those. It’s just a concept that appeals to a lot of furries, and that for whatever reason seems to work particularly well with her art style, which she’s refined over the course of many years. In fact, although I don’t pretend to know who’s gotten the most customers for commissions in the history of furry fandom, Mary Mouse would have to be one of the few highest-ranking people in that respect at least.

Thanks Bartolo, awesome comment as always. The “learned helplessness” comment is very perceptive. I see it in group-consensus ideas:

“you can’t get anywhere in furry fandom unless you draw porn” – (the flawed thinking is the part about “in furry fandom”)

“you can’t be open about liking furries because the public image is all about sex” – (so sex has to be bad?)

“the media is out to sensationalize everything bad about furries and ruin their image” – (and you can’t actively put out good stories, or cancel out what makes them bad?)

These things can be pretty self contradictory. Sometimes it gets so extreme, it’s like “Village of the Damned” with the way people robotically repeat this stuff like a mantra. I don’t buy it. One of this site’s missions is “be the media” and it’s been a great experience so far.

No furry porn artist comes even remotely close to the popularity achieved by Undertale or the critical acclaim achieved by Lackadaisy, just to quote off the top of my head two of the most successful general audience works created by “certified” furry artists. And let’s not forget that the record for the highest price ever paid for furry art is still firmly held by a SFW painting:http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Eyes_of_the_Night

It’s understandable that the amount of money thrown at MilesDF’s YCH auctions or Fek’s Patreon makes a lot of artists insecure about their own goals and tastes, but indeed they need to keep calm and look at the bigger picture. And also aim higher. Porn is mostly limited to the fandom as an audience, but SFW art is not. Nowadays there are anthros everywhere, from board games to top tier cartoons. Just a couple days ago I stumbled uponthis board game which completely blew my mind:https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/179820/tail-feathers
It’s a mainstream board game… about mice knights riding armored birds. How cool is that?

The question every furry artist wishing to live by SFW artwork should be asking himself is “how do I do something even more awesome than THAT?”. Envying porn artists when you could be striving to create the next mainstream hit is just wasted energy.

Someone compiled statistics on FurAffinity and other furry art sites a few years ago, and it turned up something rather interesting. Invididual art posts, on average, get more faves when they’re mature or adult. But when you take all the artwork on FA and do large-scale averages – general-rated art gets half of all the faves! (Boosted by the fact that 75% of uploads are general-rated.) – http://www.furaffinity.net/view/17868354/

The FurScience research team has also found out that something like over 80% of furry fans like both clean and adult art. It’s a much smaller percentage who only like one or the other.

To be honest, I love certain things done by the FurScience team, for example, getting demographic data – and find other things to be suspiciously propagandistic.

The drawback about being “house analysts of furry fandom” and doing outreach campaigns is that there isn’t an organized campaign against furries to confront. So I look at this page and find it deceptively PR-minded:http://furscience.com/stigma/

They name check some bad media portrayals that appear to conflate them all unfairly. Vanity Fair – a terrible portrayal with supposed journalistic nonfiction. CSI – a fictional TV show about murder. Those aren’t the same category or even the same medium, and why does fiction owe literal accuracy? They claim that furries fear violence (no citation) – isn’t that a sensationalist claim? And they seem to harshly reject the demonstrably true fact that furry IS a fetish for a large amount of members. That’s dishonest.

I had an experience of asking critical questions that sadly brought out even less credible behavior. I’m aware of members acting very biased for PR. We all know surveys can be designed and data twisted. Look at the sugar industry and the now discredited war on fat. It’s smart to be critical.

So, anyways, good topic and thanks for pointing that stuff out. It helps to gather lots of takes to get the shape of things.

The FA stats are from someone not affiliated with the FurScience team. I remember some earlier stats that FA did like 10 years ago, and the adult/non-adult upload percentages were still basically the same as in 2015! Remarkably consistant. Based on that I’m more willing to trust these numbers, although yeah, statistics can be massaged. Didn’t feel like this chart had an agenda.

Lackadaisy is by Tracy Butler, who says that she’s not a furry artist. She is glad that furry fans like her work, and she appreciates being invited as a guest-of-honor to our conventions, but she started her strip outside furry fandom for a general audience. She considers it incidental that furry fans have gravitated to it.

Some people would probably see this and make some snarky comment about That One Guy who’s always on the internet swearing that nobody should look sideways at his interests because he hates all those disgusting furfags, and he’s really nothing like them. But besides the fact that Tracy Butler doesn’t actually act like that stereotype, the truth is, any such comment would be completely unnecessary, because regardless of whether or not you count her as being furry, the fact still remains that Tracy Butler has a big following among furries, and that her work is an example of how it’s still possible to be successful and gain a following among furries even if you don’t draw porn.

Could it be, then, that the reason so many furry artists find themselves drawing porn of their characters isn’t because they’re forced into it by peer pressure or perverse incentives, but simply because when we have a powerful personal attachment to fantasy creatures and to imagining what it would really be like to be those creatures, and when those creatures also happen to be incredibly tactile, with invitingly warm, fluffy fur all over, it becomes kind of inevitable to have a certain amount of curiosity about what it would be like for furry characters to have sex? Could it simply be because we have fursonas that are loaded down with personal symbolism about our fantasies and aspirations, and for most people, a pretty significant part of their fantasies and aspirations tends to involve sex?

I mean, I’m being absolutely honest with you when I say that I’ve known rock climbers who have had sex at the top of an ascent, and martial artists who have actually yelled out kiais upon orgasm. There are all kinds of people who do things like those that I think aren’t really any different from having sexual fantasies about furries. And that’s something that I think both the furry world and the mundane world could do well to gain some perspective on, but it also just kind of breaks my heart to see furries feeling like they have to justify having sexualized characters, because even though I’ve been fortunate enough to know a number of communities with people who are tolerant of people whose sexuality is different from their own, I’ve never found any other community that has the degree of support and understanding of each other’s sexuality that furries have, where someone who identifies as straight and someone who identifies as gay can roleplay together, or can literally cuddle together, without either of them seeing it as a threat to them, or a betrayal of a code that they’re honor-bound to uphold.